Covering a randomly selected song every day for a year, between my 39th and 40th birthdays.
FOR GREAT JUSTICE!

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Friday, December 3, 2010

260. "Rhapsody in Pink" by Pere Ubu

Odd story here. In an attempt to get back to the random nature of the early days of 39-40, and also to crank out a whole bunch of songs in a short period of time, I decided to final deploy a tactic that I've almost used a couple of times but never quite did as intended: singing the lyrics of one song over the karaoke backing track of another one. So I let The Machine randomize my library, and took the first song with lyrics that it offered up (surprising the first Ubu song I've tackled) and then the first song for which a karaoke track was available. That turned out to be "Walk Like an Egyptian".

Now, that was odd. Because I've only ever possessed five or six karaoke tracks in my life, almost all of them purchased via the iTunes store for 39-40 purposes. Howwever, the very first such track I ever purchased was, in fact, "Walk Like an Egyptian", quite a few years ago as a backing track for a talent show performance by Eden and some of her friends back when she was in (I believe) third grade. I kept it around in my music library for years, and assumed I still had it. I don't, for some reason... I must have actually taken the very rare-for-me step of deleting it, assuming I would never need it again. So, like, in my face.

In any case, I consider this to be an extremely unlikely coincidence. I don't ascribe much (if any) meaning to such alleged synchronicity, and I can't think of anything that I might think the universe was trying to tell my through this bizarre omen-if-it-were-one, but it is definitely odd enough to bear mentioning. It's a bit of a struggle to say why, though. I mean, what am I supposed to do with this other than mention it to the 15 or so people who may read this?

My wife sort of inadvertantly said something that made me feel like the whole idea behind this recording was stupid to the max, but, after almost giving up on it completely, I'm actually pleased with how it turned out. Despite its obvious Bangly origins, it reminds me, for some odd reason, of Shriekback... the hypothethical Shriekback collaboration with Eugene Chadbourne, perhaps.